


Rest in Power

by thepinupchemist



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gun Control, Gun Violence, Homophobia, Liberal Steve Rogers, M/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Panic, Panic Attacks, Politics, Pulse shooting, liberal bucky barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 12:40:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7222735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepinupchemist/pseuds/thepinupchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes react to the Pulse shooting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rest in Power

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mara_jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mara_jade/gifts).



> General warning for everything surrounding the shooting, including homophobia and gun violence and the like. This is definitely anti-gun and I'm not here for a fight about it, so if you're waving your gun rights flag, do us both a favor and click the 'X' in the corner of your browser.

Steve wanted nothing more in that moment to be back at Avengers Tower with Bucky, working through their loaded Netflix queue cuddled up together under a pallet of blankets while they chowed down on salty modern snack foods their metabolisms burned through like brushfire. But that was not where he was, and with his big body stuffed into his dress blues, Steve forced himself to remember what brought him to this event.

Forty-nine lost lives brought him here.

Forty-nine people a part of a community that Steve somehow believed safer in the twenty first century than it had when he frequented the queer bars tucked into his and Bucky’s neighborhood. He and Bucky risked their skins for evenings of fun and community, and naively Steve thought that the risk had fizzled down into something more manageable.

But it hadn’t.

Folks like him and Bucky were still _other_ , still not right, no matter how many decades passed or rights became law.

A year had passed since Bucky returned home to Steve, bedraggled and unwashed and tired, but otherwise whole and unhurt. When Natasha and Clint herded Bucky onto Steve’s floor, shock and love overwhelmed him, but nothing on Bucky’s face betrayed how he felt about seeing Steve. Their awkward first conversation since Bucky dragged Steve out of the Potomac went as followed:

“What made you come back, Buck?” he asked.

Bucky’s eyes darted from Natasha and Clint to Steve and back again. Like a caged animal he backed closer to the wall, to a better vantage point to see every exit out of Steve’s modestly decorated living room. He licked his lips, wrung his hands – one gloved, one flesh – and said, “I-I saw a video. On the internet.”

“What about?” Steve asked, but he had a feeling that he knew.

“There were all these people and – and you said you loved me,” Bucky said, “You said you would marry me if I were still alive. You said you wanted us to be husbands. Then I saw – you can do that now? Fellas can go with fellas? There’s lotsa pictures of guys all gussied up and kissin’ and stuff and I – I thought. I’m not right, Steve, not really all good in the head, but…”

“But what?”

Nat and Clint shuffled awkwardly. They didn’t make a move to leave, however, in spite of the private nature of his and Bucky’s conversation. In all likelihood they wanted to ensure that Steve would be safe, that the Winter Soldier wasn’t in danger of appearing and taking hold of Bucky’s body.

Bucky lowered his gaze and trembled as though cold, but he lifted his eyes again and met Steve’s eyes with renewed determination. He said, “I got most of my memories. I remember how we used to be. You said you loved me.”

“I do love you,” Steve whispered.

Bucky nodded and mulled over this information. He said, “I trust you. I want to stay. Here. With you.”

The other Avengers kept an eye on Bucky in the proceeding months. Tony had JARVIS on watch and Steve was ninety percent sure that Nat bugged his entire floor, but he wasn’t a spy and doubted his ability to find anything that she planted. But the Winter Soldier seemed well and truly gone, leaving behind a scared, haunted, but unwavering iteration of Bucky behind.

Slowly but surely, Bucky began to heal. He discovered a love of daytime television and spicy quesadillas, of long, piping hot showers and fuzzy throw blankets. For the first couple of months Steve’s intimacy with Bucky was limited to spooning up behind him in bed and kissing until they both were breathless. Bucky didn’t want more than that in the beginning, though his trust in Steve grew with each passing day.

Somewhere around five months after Bucky moved into the Tower, the Avengers held a press conference and came forward with Bucky, his past, and his current relationship with Steve. To say that the subsequent backlash was a three-ring shitshow would be putting it lightly. People fought like cats and dogs over Bucky’s culpability during his captivity with Hydra, barking and clawing until the president himself pardoned Bucky and named him the longest surviving POW.

The attention overwhelmed Bucky, and he didn’t like being out in public.

Which was why, though they quietly married not two months before (a week after Bucky’s birthday, on a gorgeous spring day), Bucky did not come with Steve to the vigil and fundraiser being held for the forty nine dead and fifty three injured victims of the Pulse shooting. The avoidance didn’t come from a lack of compassion, but rather, too much of it –

When the news broke, neither of them had been sleeping. They were restless from nightmares, and gave up on going to bed around midnight. Instead they set up camp on the couch with Bucky’s favorite fuzzy blanket and a couple of mugs of tea, and watched Netflix. Steve’s phone chirped with alert after alert around two in the morning, and they switched their television from Netflix to the news.

The Avengers did not arrive in time in Orlando, only reached their destination after the gunman was killed. They helped in the aftermath, but nothing felt adequate. Weight expanded in Steve’s chest until his ribcage felt as though it might splinter, and he cried on the quinjet.

But Bucky…Bucky was even worse. He didn’t speak when they were finally en route back to New York. At home, he locked himself in the bathroom, and after three hours when Steve broke in to check on him, Bucky had tucked himself into the far corner of the generous bathtub and put his face between his knees. He didn’t make a sound, but his shoulders shook.

Steve didn’t speak. He climbed over the lip of the empty bathtub, drew his knees to his chest, and settled across from Bucky. He kept his eyes trained on Bucky while he cried without noise, and reached over the edge of the tub to pass him a wad of toilet paper to blow his nose on when he finally looked up.

“Thought things were different for fellas like us,” Bucky rasped, “Thought they were different now.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Sure, we got the shit beat outta us that one time,” Bucky went on, “but ain’t no one trapped us inside and slaughtered us like animals.”

“Yeah.”

“There were _kids_ , Steve,” Bucky said.

“I know.”

Bucky ran both hands back through his long hair and said, “All their phones was goin’ off.” In the thick of his emotion, his voice toppled straight back to an old, familiar accent that Steve thought was gone for good.

Steve nodded. Without warning, Bucky leapt across the giant tub to wedge himself between Steve’s knees, throw his arms around Steve’s neck, and tuck his face into Steve’s chest. Steve coiled his arms right back around Bucky and cradled him close, rocking his body back and forth, over and over, rubbing a hand over his spine and whispering that it was okay. But it wasn’t okay. People were dead. People with families and histories and hopes and dreams.

All of those were gone, now.

They fell asleep like that in the bathtub.

The following morning, Tony didn’t look even remotely surprised to find them like that, when he came to deliver the news about the vigil and the fact that Steve was being asked to speak. After he came out of the ice and the closet, Steve morphed into something of an icon for LGBTQIA folks. Art appeared of him in his uniform but rainbow, t-shirts popped up in stores declaring _It’s Stars AND Stripes_ over a decal of his shield, pride parades clamored for his presence and numerous historians that speculated about his sexuality celebrated.

(Fox News threw a hissy fit, but really, who gave a flying fuck about Fox News, Steve thought)

So Steve stuffed himself into his dress blues, the weight of the pins and medals on his breast heavier than usual under the scrutiny of thousands of faces. Sweat gathered at his brow, right up against his hairline, due more to nerves than to the approaching summer heat. At the podium, some kind of LGBTQIA rights activist was speaking – Steve hadn’t been paying attention, too lost in his own thoughts about everything that had happened in the last handful of days.

Steve didn’t realize that the woman introduced him until Tony put a hand on Steve’s back and shoved him forward.

Steve stumbled up to the podium, red-cheeked, and looked out at the sea of faces, most holding cupped hands around lit candles. He cleared his throat and said, “Thank you for coming out tonight to benefit the victims and their families of this tragedy,” and breathed deep, “The Pulse shooting hit close to home, not only for myself, but for my husband, too. Way back when, we had gay bars, too. Most of the time they were open secrets, and you never knew when the cops might raid and you might get hurt. Me and Buck…we…after one night out, when I was still a little guy, a couple guys jumped us. They beat us to heck and called us names. We barely made it home.

“But those guys used their fists, and they didn’t walk away from that scuffle without a few bruises of their own. Fists don’t do much against an assault rifle. When the Avengers arrived on the scene, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was – was so much destruction. So much bloodshed. I have seen battle. I fought in World War II and the Battle of New York, and I’ve seen what happens when rich men wage wars.

“The forty nine killed and fifty three injured in Orlando were targeted because they were queer, the same way Bucky and I were targeted in 1939. When I came out of the ice, they told me that the world had changed. I got briefings and books and strangers on the street telling me what was different. Reporters asking what I thought about this thing or that. I came out of the closet as a bisexual gentleman because according to scores of people, that kind of thing was safe now.

“But some things haven’t changed, and it’s not safe, is it? Hatred and fear and greedy lawmakers have enabled a continued campaign of violence. I want those lawmakers, the congressmen and the lobbyists, to remember the names of the people that we lost because of them. I want them to remember Eddie Justice, who texted his mom that he loved her from the bathroom before he died. I want them to remember Akyra Murray, who was just eighteen years old and about to start college on a basketball scholarship. I want them to remember Luis Vielma, who was a student working at an amusement park.”

Steve’s voice caught. His eyes stung. His chest could burst under the pressure and his head swam. But this was important. This was so important.

“We need to remember these faces. These people. Their lives were worth just as much as the lives of everyone standing here tonight, and I don’t want a single one of them forgotten. Maybe I’m naïve, or maybe I’m an optimist, when I say that I believe we have the power to change minds and the state of this country. Maybe I’m the only one that thinks that we can.”

Steve inhaled, exhaled. His face was hot and wet and God, this would be all over the news.

“But I’m willing to bet that I’m not,” he said, and tore away from the podium without another word to stride off of the stage and out of sight, seeking someplace quiet as the weight on his chest grew and grew and grew and the water on his face dripped down his chin and onto his uniform. He stowed himself in a corner, pressing up against the wall, and bawled.

The last time that Steve felt as helpless as he did now, he was leaning out of the gaping wound in a rattling train car, wind whipping into his face like barbs as the tips of his fingers just missed Bucky’s hand. Knowing this evil existed in the world was like watching Bucky’s body break away from the train and plummet down, down, down, out of sight.

Bucky was a kid, as too many of the victims were kids.

Overwrought, Steve wept on their behalf. Irrationally he wondered if he should have been there to save them, and wished more than anything that he could have been. But he wasn’t, and he couldn’t. All that Steve could do now was try to do better in the aftermath, to take a stand and make sure that nothing like this would ever happen again in the country that he loved.

“Whoa, hey, hey, breathe, man.”

Steve jerked his head up to see Clint crouched in front of him in a rumpled suit.

“Sorry,” Steve said. He angrily wiped at the tear tracks on his face, a tangled mass of embarrassed and aggrieved. He didn’t want any of the Avengers to see him this way. He led their charge, and as the man that directed them on the battlefield Steve needed to be stalwart in the upkeep of his steady appearance. He needed to be a man to be relied upon, not a blubbering mess losing his mind like a shellshocked soldier in a corner behind an outdoor stage.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” Clint said, and extended a hand to help Steve stand.

Steve shook his head. He clawed desperately at his sense of control but already everything spiraled and he couldn’t breathe. He could have been any one of those kids in that club, and that knowledge made their deaths settle on him all the more heavily.

While his breath caught and tremors rattled his body, Steve became aware of somebody else joining them, of a distant voice asking, “Shit, is he all right?”

“Don’t think so,” Clint’s voice answered back, “Hey, Steve. Dude. Your phone is ringing.”

Steve’s limbs were too heavy to move, but somebody moved them for him, patted down the pocket on the front of the uniform and popped it open to remove his phone. Clint. Clint was helping, was holding his phone. It wasn’t ringing anymore, and Clint was pacing while speaking into it.

“No, he’s not okay,” Clint was saying, “He’s freaking the fuck out. I don’t know! Well, what the hell are we supposed to do about it? It’s like he doesn’t even hear us.”

Tony – Tony was there too? – took the phone out of Clint’s hand and said, “Listen, Red Scare, we’ve got two options. You can get your frosty ass down here, or we can get him back to the Tower.  Yeah, yeah, you should’ve been here, you left him alone, blah, blah, blah, old man guilt. Which is it gonna be? Choose before your spouse chokes on his emotions. Right. Okay,” – Tony hung up the phone, bent over Steve, and tucked the cell back into the breast pocket of his uniform – “C’mon, Cap, we’re gonna get you back to your hubs, okay? Follow the sultry sound of my voice.”

Steve nodded and let himself be hauled up by two sets of hands. His surroundings blended together in a smear of color, as though he was walking through a watercolor of the world.

“All right, big guy, let’s get in the car,” Tony said.

The aroma of new leather and pine air freshener swallowed Steve’s senses. More hands handled him, herded him into sitting down and buckled him in place. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, even as a soothing hand rubbed over his arm and said, “Hey, man, breathe for me, okay? You’re in Tony’s car. It’s 2016. You’re okay.”

“Not okay,” Steve managed to squeeze out.

“All right,” conceded Clint, “You’re not okay. That’s fair. But you’re gonna be okay. We’re gettin’ you back home and you don’t have to worry about none of this shit anymore.”

Clint was wrong. Steve would always have to worry about it. He remembered the worry of being caught with Bucky, before the war, before everything – remembered the fear of being dealt a blue ticket once he hauled Bucky out of Azzano, even if guys cared less about fellas making time with fellas out on the front than they did back stateside. The comfort of waking up in the new century was knowing that he could worry less, but this – this reminded him of every ounce of fear that crawled through him every damn day of his life.

Whether the car ride was quick or slow, Steve couldn’t say. He only knew that Tony and Clint came to a stop and extracted Steve from the car, and that they hadn’t made it ten steps before a familiar warmth and wonderful scent pressed to Steve. Strong arms came to pull him to a burly chest, and the smells of cigarette smoke and expensive bath products hugged him just as tight.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come with you, babydoll,” Bucky’s voice rumbled, “Let’s get home, huh? We’ll wrap up in some blankets and we’ll forget about this.”

“Can’t forget,” Steve said.

“All right, we won’t forget,” Bucky corrected, stroking over Steve’s spine, “We’ll take our minds off of it. Thanks for bringin’ him back home, Barton.”

“Hey, what about me?” asked Tony.

Steve felt Bucky’s body shift with something like an eye-roll as he said, “You too, dickhead.”

In the elevator, Bucky applied his lips to the center of Steve’s still-sweating forehead and murmured soothing nothings to him, some in English, others in Russian or Romanian or other languages that Steve didn’t quite know. He punched in their floor, pet his fingers through Steve’s hair, and when they reached their destination, Bucky tugged Steve all the way to stand beside their sofa.

The sofa smelled a little musty, being an antique, but Bucky and Steve had liked the look of it when they went furniture shopping. It reminded them of a shabbier, cheaper sofa that Sarah Rogers had parked in the living room, the sofa whose cushions they pulled onto the floor and made forts out of, all the way into their twenties.

Oddly it was this notion that brought Steve a level of clarity. He swayed on his feet and caught himself on the arm of the couch.

“You with me, doll?” asked Bucky.

Steve smeared a hand over his still-hot face. His skin felt wet to the touch. His eyes were probably swollen and pink. Steve never had been a graceful crier, had never cried the way that movie stars did in the pictures. His crying was a snotty, red-faced mess.

“Fuck,” Steve said.

“Yeah,” agreed Bucky, “You think you can change out of those dress blues? Get into something comfy?”

Steve nodded. Exhaustion infiltrated every crevice of his body. The process of removing his uniform and replacing it with a t-shirt and pajamas took real concentration. Afterward, he perched on the edge of his and Bucky’s mattress. He wasn’t sure how long he sat by himself, but enough time passed that Bucky came after him and knocked on the frame of their bedroom door.

“Stevie?” he said hoarsely.

“Yeah, Buck?”

“Come out here. We’re gonna cozy up on the cushions, okay?”

Steve stumbled across the room to Bucky and leaned his weight against him. Bucky could handle his two hundred and forty pounds of muscle, and did so with poise, steering Steve all the way to their living room and pushing him down to sit on the couch cushions arranged on the floor. Just like they used to do, just like old times.

Just like the couch cushions, the fear of their kind being hurt and slaughtered was the same in this moment as it was in 1939.

Bucky sat beside Steve and looped an arm around his broad shoulders. He said, “I shoulda gone with you to speak at that thing.”

“You don’t like public appearances,” Steve said.

“Sure, but I shouldn’t have let you do this shit alone,” Bucky replied, “Everything about this whole thing – it really got to me, you know? Didn’t wanna lose my shit in front of the entire goddamn nation. But I let you do it instead and now I feel like an asshole, but there’s no changing that I didn’t go to the vigil so I’m gonna have to figure out a way to make this better.”

“No, Buck, you were just taking care of yourself,” Steve said.

Bucky shrugged a shoulder, “I think this time I should’ve been taking care of you.”

They sat cuddled together in silence for several minutes. Bucky didn’t break the moment with speech, but instead broke it with kisses, applying his lips to the skin of Steve’s throat, up along his jaw, over his forehead and eyelids and the tip of his nose until he reached Steve’s mouth and coaxed him into a tender, sweet kiss.

“I love you, you know?” Bucky rasped.

Steve nodded. Tried not to think of all the people that must have loved the victims in that club. Thought about them anyway. A sad shudder snapped through him.

Eventually, he lifted his head. He guided Bucky to lie with his back down against the cushions, and Bucky seemed to understand the comfort that Steve needed. He brought his arms up to rest around Steve’s neck, and let Steve kiss him with a little more heat and a couple more tears.

Neither of them even undressed all the way – Steve eased Bucky’s sweatpants and underwear down to the middle of his thighs and freed his own cock from the confines of his pajamas. He slotted them together and wrapped his big palm around both of them. Below him, Bucky gasped and burst with sentiments in languages that Steve didn’t understand. He knew some of the words were endearments. Others encouragement. Others more dirty.

The touch was sweet and slow, nothing like the frenzies that they could work themselves into given the chance. When both of them came with their cocks pressed between their bellies, Steve wrapped all four limbs around Bucky and cradled their bodies together without a thought to the mess.

He could have lost Bucky, Bucky could have lost him – they were lucky that their lives played out as they did, and both of them lay here breathing one another’s air as they had in the century before.

The kids taken out by this injustice, those kids and their families and their loved ones, no longer had the luxury of breathing one another’s air, or wrapping their arms around each other on a couch cushion structure on the floor.

“I love you too,” Steve said, subdued.

**

“So, Mr. Barnes, would you care to tell us why you broke your ban on public appearances to speak with us today?” Christine Everhart asked.

Bucky spared a glance at Steve, who’d stuffed himself into a well-tailored suit for the occasion, same as Bucky. He offered an encouraging smile, and Bucky offered one of his own in return before he focused back on Ms. Everhart. He breathed in deep and said, “I should have been with Steve at the vigil for the victims of the Pulse shooting. That’s – that’s my community too. Has been for a long, long time. I didn’t think I could handle laying myself bare for all those people, the way Steve did. I’m real proud of him.”

“We have a clip that you said you’d like us to play,” Ms. Everhart said, “Should we roll that?”

“Yes, please,” Bucky answered.

On the screen behind them, Bucky and Steve’s faces appeared in a safe stretch of middle-of-nowhere, framed by the recording from Tony’s Iron Man suit.

“Ready, Buck?” Screen-Steve said.

“I’m ready,” Bucky said, “Blast ‘em, Tony.”

“You got it, Frosty,” Tony’s voice said. The view shifted to a pile of what could not be mistaken for anything but Bucky’s collection of military grade weaponry, thrown together at a distance. Tony shot his repulsors right at the cache, and predictably they exploded on sight.

“All right, we’re – oh, ew,” Tony said, the recording panning back to Bucky and Steve, where Steve had ducked his head to capture Bucky’s mouth in a chaste kiss.

The clip ended, and Christine Everhart turned her attention to Bucky with raised brows. She said, “Did I watch what I think I just did?”

“Probably,” Bucky answered, “I stuck every assault rifle I own in a giant pile and I had Tony blow ‘em up. I still got my handguns and my knives, but you know what? I don’t need my damn AR-15, ‘specially not with the blood that weapon’s got on it over the years. I would rather work with safer weaponry than put the rest of the nation in danger for the sake of my guns – so to hell with it. They’re gone,” Bucky looked dead-on into the cameras and said, “And if the Winter Soldier doesn’t need a goddamned AR-15? Neither do _you_.”

Steve yanked Bucky into a not-so-PG kiss and said, just loud enough for everyone watching to hear, “I’m real proud of you too.”

“We gotta do better,” Bucky said, “We gotta do better by our country. If you don’t believe me? Believe Captain America.”

Steve ran his palm over Bucky’s leg and rested his hand on his knee. He said, “I am tired of paying for the second amendment with human lives.”

“And we’re tired of the hate that drove somebody to this,” Bucky added.

“More than one factor contributed to this tragedy,” Steve agreed, “but we want change to start here. We want it to start with us.”


End file.
